The fires that have raged in the Pyrénées-Orientales wine regions, Bordeaux in France and vineyards in Andalusia and Rioja in Spain are also having consequences for the availability of wine in Sweden.
This is stated by Elisabeth Due, CEO of the trade organisation Spirit and Wine Suppliers Association, to TT.
The fires are terrible primarily for the hundreds of thousands of people who have been affected and forced to evacuate their homes, she emphasises.
The devastating fires will also affect the supply of French and Spanish wines in Sweden in the future.
Grape harvests are destroyed, either in fires or by smoke settling on the vines, negatively affecting the quality of the grape must and can make the grapes unusable, says Elisabeth Due.
Difficult to replace
It is often very old vines that produce the best wines, she notes. A 30–40-year-old vine that burns down is difficult to replace.
If new plantings are to be brought in, it could take at least five years before they produce crops and have an effect on a large scale, says Elisabeth Due, adding that there is a risk that affected producers will not even be able to rebuild vineyards after the fires.
While the taste of a blended wine can be adjusted, wines from Bordeaux are also particularly difficult to replace because they have a special character based on soil, climate and grape variety.
Price effect already now
Sweden imports around a hundred different wines from the Bordeaux district alone. The risk that more Bordeaux favourites among Swedes will disappear in the future is high, according to Elisabeth Due.
The wine we drink in Sweden today was harvested two years ago, so the shortage of wine from the fire-ravaged districts in Spain and France will only be noticeable in a couple of years.
Elisabeth Due also cannot say how much of the wine is now stored in premises destroyed by the fires.
But the knowledge of the impending shortage of wine from the affected regions will affect prices even now, she says.
We can probably expect a price increase of around 15 percent for these wines, she says.
Corrected: In a previous version there was an incorrect entry about Bordeaux wines.
